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“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” the former
National Security Agency contract employee said in an interview, his first since arriving in Russia
in June. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been
trying to do was validated.

“Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to
determine if it should change itself.”

Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of
top-secret documents from the NSA. Hundreds of revelations followed as news organizations around
the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old
lawsuits, and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought
for years to conceal.

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off
many of its historic restraints after the attack of Sept. 11. Secret legal authorities empowered
the NSA to sweep up the phone, Internet and location records of whole populations.

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “
That is a milestone we left a long time ago.”

The cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the courts, popular culture,
Silicon Valley and world capitals. The basic structure of the Internet is now in question, as
Brazil and members of the European Union ponder measures to keep their data away from U.S.
territory, and technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary steps to
block data collection by the government.

“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging
that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.

“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize
that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong,
the marketplace of ideas will bear that out.”

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s motives and said the NSA’s work
was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage
and felony theft of government property.

In the intelligence and national-security establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless
saboteur, and journalists abetting him little less so.

At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel
seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before
walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.

“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled war fighters to
find the enemy first. “Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people,
you don’t have a clue.”

People who accuse him of disloyalty, Snowden said, mistake his purpose.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA; I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still
working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to
handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people. But he also said he believed acceptance of the
agency’s operations was not universal.

His colleagues were “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on
Americans then we are on Russians in Russia,” he said.